It’s been a week or so since me and my brother had the idea of making an English Translation Audio recording of the Siri Guru Granth Sahib and we are in full swing! Adi Shakti Singh from Texas as offered assistance with editing audio and a few enthusiastic local Sikhs have volunteered to record the audio.

Along with all the many other things going on at SikhNet one of the things which took a while was to work out the format and system for recording the audio. When this project is done the complete audio will be over 120 hours long! Aside from the technical aspects, we had to come up with a method that was manageable and not too time consuming, while at the same time in a format that could be used for other purposes.

Each Shabad will be recorded as a separate audio file, so we can mix it later on with other versions. This will also enable us to setup a virtual "audio hukamnama" feature where you can listen to a random hukamnama for you. We will also use the split up versions of the audio in the new SikhNet Gurbani section along with the original shabad. So you will be able to hear multiple versions of the shabad in Gurmukhi, and then also hear the English translation version recited.

We are trying to get 4-8 different people recording the audio so the amount of time is limited on the number of people that can record at a time. To keep things simple and keep the audio quality high we had to purchase two portable digital audio recorders and some other audio hardware. We could use more recorders, but trying to keep costs minimal.

All the audio recordings will be made available freely online for people to enjoy. If you would like to help us with this project I would like to welcome you to make a donation to SikhNet to help cover some of the audio equipment costs (so far at about $1,000), in addition we could use at least one more audio recorder so that more people can record at the same time, and have the project get done faster. Our goal is to have this completed within a few months (before the summer). Once we are done with this project we’ll use the audio recorders for recording Sikh Audio Stories for Children.

You can listen to the below sample which we recorded to test the process and see how it might sound.The recording starts with Sat Nirmal Kaur and then two thirds in it fades over to me reading. It will be lots of fun to find different background audio to mix and change around to.

SGGS English Translation Audio Sample

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